But give credit where it’s due: At one point, Trump actually told the truth. On July 23, 2015, candidate Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper he was a “great uniter.” Seven months into the job, he has made good on that claim.

Trump has united past presidents, Democrats, the Republican leadership, Republican Jewish groups, blacks, Hispanics, Mexicans, corporate business elites, Hollywood stars, the U.S. military, governors, mayors, the PM of Great Britain and countries as disparate as Israel and Iran — united them in a common feeling of disgust over his odious post-Charlottesville equivocations.

And he doesn’t care. In fact, insiders say he is “basking” in his own words. Perhaps he takes heart in the fact that Steve Bannon, the ugly nihilist at the president’s right hand who wants to blow up the administrative state, agrees with him. Or maybe it’s former KKK grand wizard David Duke, gushing about Trump’s “courage” and “honesty,” putting a smile on the president’s face.

It hardly matters. A man whose mind lacks the bladder control of a newborn baby is now careening into a political wall with his stroller up on two wheels. America is zigzagging between impeachment or a military spectacle intended to change the channel — one or the other. Rule of law on one hand, law of the jungle on the other.

The Fox News crowd, which usually belts out Heil to the Chief under the worst of circumstances, couldn’t even find a Republican to come on TV and defend this oafish president. Actor Josh Gad (whose grandparents survived the Holocaust) put it very well: “Sound the alarm. The country is on fire. And the arsonist is the President.”

What is surprising, though, is how many Trump people — who really ought to know better — are sticking around for the ride. Vice President Mike Pence still looks at Trump like he’s gazing at the infant Jesus — despite being repeatedly lied to and contradicted by a boss who seems to enjoy making his “subordinates” look like dorks in public.

Pence would not overtly challenge the president’s view that there is no difference between anti-Semitic neo-Nazis and protesters standing up to a hate crusade that has already permanently disfigured modern American history.

But Pence has an answer. The problem, he claims, is not Trump — it’s the media which obsesses over the president’s words, instead of the white supremacists’ deeds. That’s how the Bible-thumper is defending the pussy-grabber these days.

Nor did Pence disagree with the president’s assertion that there were some “very fine people” marching with those neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. The front page of the online edition of the Jerusalem Post had an apt reply to that idiotic assertion in the form of a question:

“Will U.S. President Donald Trump look into the eyes of a Holocaust survivor and tell her that even one Nazi swastika flag is okay?”

Scheer is disavowing The Rebel because of Charlottesville, and only because of Charlottesville. He’s doing it because that calamity may be big enough to swamp a president’s boat — and because the better man in his own party, Michael Chong, disavowed it first.

And then there are those who practise Trump-enabling through silence — including his daughter Ivanka. Her one-off tweet condemning white supremacists hardly counts as taking a stand … especially since it failed to mention her father.

Her husband, Jared Kushner — a Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors — has also remained silent on Trump’s initial refusal to call out the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and his inflammatory statements since. David Friedman, Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Stephen Miller — all Jewish, all members of the Trump administration, all silent.

In fact, there has not been a single resignation (yet) from Trump’s staff, despite his alarming display of ignorance, cruelty — and detachment from reality.

And the Trump White House isn’t the only North American political institution that has lost touch with the real world. The Conservative Party of Canada must now confront a hard fact: Their current leader lacks the nerve to pull the party back to the centre of what might be called ‘responsible conservatism’. In the wake of Charlottesville, that matters. If Conservatives don’t wise up, they may become the pot-bellied pigs of Canadian politics: yesterday’s fad that just smells up the house now.

Andrew Scheer says he won’t grant interviews to The Rebel, the Breitbart News wannabe run by Ezra Levant, under its current editorial direction. That’s nice. So what was it about Rebel’s former, pre-Charlottesville editorial direction that made Scheer comfortable enough to appear on the website several times when he was running for the leadership?

The Rebel was then, and is now, a collection of chocolate-encrusted nutbars — the lunatic villa of the alt-right.

And it should be said also that Scheer didn’t have any problem with having his leadership campaign run by Hamish Marshall, who was on the board of directors of The Rebel and is now, we are told, severing ties with the organization. So Scheer’s attempt to pretend he has only a passing familiarity with Ezra’s work is nonsense.

Scheer is suddenly disavowing The Rebel because of Charlottesville, and only because of Charlottesville. He’s doing it because that calamity may be big enough to swamp a president’s boat — and because the better man in his own party, Michael Chong, disavowed the rabidly right-wing website first.

Chong fully understands how much Charlottesville reminds people of the dark and dire agenda set by his party in the last election and since, with policies like banning the niqab, screening immigrants and dreaming up something as fascist as the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Practices Act.

It’s a shame — for the Conservative Party of Canada — that the party took a pass on Chong and handed Stephen Harper’s ideological torch to a bird of the same feather. A dodo.

And for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a postscript: Prime minister, you can coast a long way on selfies in a content-averse universe. But occasions arise when more is required of a leader than imagery. Donald Trump had already given the world his wish-washy take on Charlottesville. We didn’t need one from you.

What we needed from you was the straight goods. That means outing the racists by name and calling out the president of the United States for enabling violent, racist acts. That might have made your next meeting with Trump a little uncomfortable. But it’s a little like being told an off-color joke: If you don’t confront the person who told it, you might as well as laugh and walk away, realizing you have been diminished.

As for that report in the New Yorker about Trudeau advisor Gerald Butts being friends with Steve Bannon … it’s hard to picture the basis for such a relationship.

What on earth would Butts find to talk about over multiple dinners with the likes of Bannon? Headlines from his days at Breitbart? Birth Control Makes Woman Unattractive and Crazy. Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer? What We Need To Do is Bitch-Slap the Republican Party.

Or maybe that divorce filing from Bannon’s wife, stating that Bannon didn’t like Jews and didn’t want his girls going to school with Jews because they raised “whiney brats”?

The PMO, of course, maintains that the personal relationship between Bannon and Butts, like the one between Katie Telford and Jared Kushner, is just part of the job. And maybe it is when you’re playing Masters of the Universe in a Washington restaurant.

Schmoozing with the devil and his minions is no better than dancing with them. After Charlottesville, no one can pretend they don’t know what Donald Trump and this White House really are.

Time to follow Republican Senator Bob Corker’s lead and say it out loud. This president is incompetent and unstable. Pretending otherwise only makes things worse.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.